THE CONVERGENT A.I. CONSORTIUM
Stop Figuring Out A.I. Alone.
Join a curated community of higher education professionals exploring AI with integrity - not hype, not panic, but the actual questions that don't have clean answers yet.
DOES THIS SOUND LIKE YOU?
"I've been experimenting with AI but I don't tell my colleagues -
I might be the only one in my department exploring this,
or the only one admitting it."
"I know AI is changing everything but my department acts like
if we ignore it, it'll go away."
"I want to use it ethically but I don't even know what ethical use
looks like yet."
"I wish there was a community doing this work together -
sharing lessons, collaborating, not figuring it out alone."
"I can't shake the feeling that by not engaging with AI now, we're being irresponsible to our students and our fields."
If any of that landed, you're not behind.
You're early.
You Know AI Is Changing Everything.
You Just Don't Want to Navigate It Alone.
WHAT IS CAIC?
A Think Tank for the Rest of Us
The Convergent AI Consortium (CAIC) is a framework-aligned research collective where interdisciplinary thinkers - educational researchers, humanities scholars, ethicists, psychologists, and computer scientists - build AI futures that refuse extraction and center relational integrity.
We welcome undergrads, grad students, K-12 educators, professors, and independent scholars who converge expertise, question assumptions, and design systems that serve humanity without the institutional theater. If you're done with ech solutionism and ready for grounded, ethically engaged work that's unapologetically adaptive, this is your table.
This isn't a webinar series. It's not a certification program. It's a living, breathing intellectual space where people who care about justice, pedagogy, and research integrity come together to think with AI - not just about it.
The reality is clear: the tools are accelerating. Policies are being written without us. And the ethical questions aren't getting simpler.
Have your CAIC and think with it too.
CAIC exists because if we don't shape this conversation, someone else will shape it for us. And we've seen what happens when the people closest to the human dimensions of scholarship aren't at the table.
WHAT YOU'LL GET
-
Monthly Live Meetings
Last Thursday of every month on Zoom. These aren't lectures - they're working sessions where we think together, share what we're building, and wrestle with the tensions nobody else is naming.
-
Meeting Replays
Every session is recorded and shared as unlisted YouTube links for members only. Miss a month? You're still in the loop.
-
Community Forum
A dedicated online space with channels designed for the way we actually work:
▸ AI Tool Labs: test, review, and compare tools together
▸ Prompt Engineering: share and refine prompts for research and teaching
▸ Ethical + Justice Frameworks: where the hard questions live
▸ Project Showcase & Feedback: share your work, get real responses
▸ AI Pedagogies & Policies: syllabi, assignments, institutional navigation
▸ Resources & Library: curated articles, tools, and reference materials
▸ Monthly Meeting Replays: all recordings in one place
▸ Live Events & Workshops: announcements for special sessions
▸ AI Memes & Jokes: because we need to laugh too
▸ Q&A: bring your questions anytime
-
Curated Research Drops
Regular article drops and research digests pulled from the latest scholarship on AI in qualitative methods, higher education, ethics, and pedagogy - so you don't have to chase the literature alone.
-
#30DaysofAI Content
Structured prompts and micro-challenges designed to build your AI fluency one day at a time - practical, low-pressure, and actually useful.
WHO IS THIS FOR?
This Space Was Built For You If ...
You're faculty, a researcher, a graduate student, an administrator, or an independent scholar in higher education. You have a serious curiosity about AI and you want a space to explore it critically alongside people who take the work - and the ethics - seriously. You don't need to be technical. You just need to be willing to think.
This Might Not Be Your Space If ...
You're looking for someone to give you a simple answer about whether AI is all good or all bad. You want a tech tutorial channel or a plug-and-play toolkit. You're not particularly interested in the ethical, justice-oriented, or pedagogical dimensions of this work. That's okay - there are spaces for that. This one is for people who want to sit in the complexity.
WHAT MEMBERS ARE SAYING
From the First Cohort
"So many people are looking for leadership in this space. There's a huge need and nobody that I see is there yet."
— CAIC Founding Member
"You have a very visionary approach to the possibilities of AI... if we know that we share values, then there's trust to then experiment with things that include things that are very uncertain or that have risks."
— CAIC Founding Member
"It offers the chance to engage with this in very agentic ways. They're not passive recipients. They're building, they're co-creating, and it fosters this comfort with AI but also a sense that - oh wow, I can actually be part of the making of what this turns out to be."
— CAIC Founding Member
MEET YOUR INSTRUCTOR
Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya
Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya is a qualitative methodologist, cultural scholar, and educator with over 20 years of experience disrupting how research gets designed, conducted, and taught in higher education. With 100+ publications spanning decolonizing methodologies, contemplative inquiry, and South Asian diasporic epistemologies, she has built a body of work that refuses to separate rigor from justice.
Now, she's bringing that same lens to AI. As a researcher actively building and testing AI tools for qualitative inquiry, teaching AI-integrated doctoral courses, and developing original frameworks for responsible AI engagement in scholarship, Dr. Bhattacharya isn't theorizing from the sidelines. She's in it - building custom GPTs, designing AI playgrounds for doctoral students, creating ethical protocols for AI-assisted research, and publishing on the intersections of AI, qualitative methods, and borderlands theory.
She founded CAIC because she needed thinkers. Not followers. Not an audience. People who would think with her - across disciplines, across rank, across borders - about what it means to do this work with integrity.
Editor of Qualitative Research (DCQR). Award-winning professor. Builder of sovereign research spaces. And the person who decided that if nobody was going to create the AI think tank higher education actually needs, she'd do it herself.
Frequently Asked Questions
You have questions? We have answers.
Check out the questions below and if you're still sitting with questions, don't hesitate to email Dr. Bhattacharya: [email protected]
What exactly do I get for $20/month?
Is this only for faculty, or can graduate students or independent researchers join?
What if I can't attend live?
Can I cancel anytime?
How is this different from a webinar or a course?
Created by Dr. Kakali Bhattacharya. Independent. Community-centered. Not owned by any institution.